Nathan News

Every school in the Plantz District has boxes of supplies — children’s underwear, toiletries, prom dresses — and they’re always looking for ways to de-stigmatize the process of getting those items to students who need them. At River Valley High, they are stored in the Raider room (named after the school mascot), which also has a shower. She gets the kids in and out to do various school-related tasks so that visiting the room isn’t seen as a sign of poverty. When one of his students, a cheerleader, stopped coming to school because her unstable housing situation prevented her from doing her hair in the morning, Plantz bought her a $14 hair straightener at Walgreens. and put it in the Raider Room. “Get off the bus, go straight to the shower and do your hair there,” she said. Last December, after a mother showed up at a district office saying her boyfriend had set fire to everything she owned, including the papers she would need to register her three children, Plantz went to her office, got her purse and took the mother to Walmart: She bought two outfits and a coat for each child so they could come to school the next day. She signed up one of the children for counseling and left the mother with gas cards and a list of possible apartment rentals.

The McKinney-Vento Act supports small annual grants to help with these types of efforts, but most districts do not receive them; the application process can be cumbersome. In addition to requiring school districts to appoint a liaison officer, the law is meant to remove barriers to education by removing address requirements for enrollment or allowing students to remain at their home school. if their family is forced to move. But these provisions have not been widely understood or uniformly applied.

There is very little data on homelessness in rural parts of the country, and it is the McKinney-​Vento liaisons who most often, though sometimes imperfectly, fill the gap. In 2018, Montana, for example, saw a 145% increase in the number of homeless students, not because many more children suddenly became homeless, but because a new McKinney-Vento coordinator at statewide has stepped up its efforts. The neighborhood right next to Plantz’s, which is demographically similar, still has fewer than 10 homeless students per year. And Ohio as a whole reported that 1.8% of its students were homeless in the 2019-20 school year, a number that Valerie Kunze, deputy director of vulnerable youth programs for the Department of Education Ohio Education recognizes as an undercount. “You have places that are 0%, and there just isn’t 0%,” she told me.

But even with its many flaws and inconsistencies, the McKinney-Vento Liaison Reports, aggregated by the Department of Education, represent a critical and rare effort to quantify the problem of student homelessness, particularly in rural areas. The DOE’s definition of homelessness is broader than that used, for example, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and better able to capture what homelessness generally looks like for rural youth and families – Blake’s family living in a cramped campervan on a hill where families doubled up sometimes in dangerous situations out of sight – as opposed to living on the streets or in a shelter. In 2019, the last reporting year before the pandemic, HUD’s annual single-night tally found 53,692 homeless parents and children. In the same school year, the DOE, using McKinney-Vento Liaison data, counted 1.4 million school-aged children as homeless.

When schools closed during Covid, the main way to identify and help homeless children also closed. A nationwide survey of McKinney-Vento liaisons conducted by School House Connection and the University of Michigan in 2020 estimated that approximately 420,000 homeless students simply disappeared from the lists, without follow-up or help.

The number was part of the reason Congress allocated $800 million in aid for homeless students under the American Recovery Plan Act, an unprecedented amount. For the first time, many school districts that have never received McKinney-Vento grants have found themselves with a sudden, albeit temporary, injection of resources and a broader mandate for how to use them. Some schools have purchased blocks of motel rooms and others have hired consultants to help families navigate the housing system. When the first of two rounds of promised ARPA funding made its way to the Plantz District in the spring, she considered various projects with something in mind that would still be there when the funding ran out, deciding on new shelves for clothing and toiletries. and washing machines that she could put in a discreet place. “The kids used the ones in the country house, but they have to ask permission, and it’s very noticeable,” she said.

Lisa Brooks, director of youth initiatives at the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, also had the long term in mind. With money from her organization’s ARPA, she started a program to directly train school staff on how to support homeless students. For her, the opportunity to expand capacity on this scale was exciting, but she worried about what would happen when the money ran out. “It was a response to a crisis — the pandemic — but the national student homelessness crisis is ongoing,” Brooks said. “Sandra’s model is not sustainable. It is not possible that there is only one champion in the district.